Doctorow: Ebooks Neither E Nor Books

xanderwilson writes "Author Cory Doctorow has released his paper/speech for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference this year into the public domain. A very interesting read about his experience with Magic Kingdom (which he is soon re-releasing under a more lenient Creative Commons license), the failure of e-books, and filesharing as a tool for creators."

Comments

Word wrap?

[ackthpt]

I wouldn't read e-books either if they have this same problem with no-word-wrap. Horizontal scrolling to read in my humble experience is annoying, too bad someone didn't do a better job of formatting it.

I can't think of many examples where I've prefered an e-reference over printed matter. The paradigm is that paper is portable and requires no power (aside from a light source) to read, never expires, never needs an upgrade (other than me needing glasses, which would apply equally in either case) and is durable (drop my Zaurus or laptop and I'll cry, drop my book and I'll just pick it back up.)

Complimenting e-books and paper seems reasonable, though I'll go to the paper first every time.

Paper manuals

[LostCluster]

Several open source projects like MySQLhave found a way to make money by selling their maunal as a printed book, even though all of the content of said book is already available online. Some people just like having their documentation on paper so they have more screen space for other things.

eBooks, failure?

[bnlrules]

I work for a large corporate library with a large collection of eBooks. They are easily more popular than the hard copies. For quick reference they can't be beat!

The real reason for Ebook

[Lord Apathy]

Ebooks aren't dead. People just haven't caught on to the real reasons to read ebooks on your palm pilot other than a real book. Compactness, you can cram about a 100 ebooks on an average 128mb memory stick. This is the eqivilant of carrying a small library with you every where you go. An this is very important. Nothing is worse than being suck on the can with nothing to read.

This goes to my second reason with compactness. You can stick a palm pilot in you pocket when you head to the can at work. It looks less suspicous when you head to the head to take a shi than if you had a book under your arm. Boss won't notice as much.

The big problem...

[Hiro Antagonist]

The big problem with ebooks lies in the readers; devices capable of reading ebooks are bulky, fragile, expensive, and nominally not as easy on the eyes as paper; in addition, most of them are read-only, which means that you can't write notes in the margin or hilight passages for later use.

Personally, I'd like to see a low-power (eight to sixteen hours on a single charge) tablet-PC-like device, one which is as easy on the eyes as a normal book (not that hard, really[1]), has a small-but-useful amount of storage (say, 8M of RAM and 512M of compactflash), and into which I can upload textbooks and course notes for all of my college courses. It has to be durable as well; I should be able to accidentally knock this thing off a table into an aquarium, and it should still work.

Give it some simple handwriting recognition, some decent calculation software, and the ability to link up with a desktop via a USB cable, and you could sell tons of these things to college students. I know I'd jump at the opportunity to not lug around a 40lb backpack, laptop case, two-inch binder filled with notes...oh, and a rew reference manuals...even if it cost me a few hundred bucks. Textbook publishers could also get in on the game; charge half as much for an E-book (which can't be resold), and use this as incentive to sell the tablet devices. Everyone wins -- the publishers make more money (no printing, shipping, or warehousing costs), the tablet maker wins, and the students win (less back strain, cheaper textbooks, ability to have an entire library in a satchel).

[1] If you're willing to keep it black-and-white, just use a farly high-resolution LCD, and use a plain white sheet of paper as a background; the paper will reflect ambient light properly, except where the LCD is active -- presto, paper-like black-on-white text, just like a book.

the right niche for them

[bigbigbison]

I am a phd student and as a result I am often writing research papers with lots of references. I know that I would LOVE to have ebook versions of the books I read so that I wouldn't have to spend so much time trying to find one line or one paragraph in a book that talked about something I want to cite. I would love to be able to do a keywork seach for these books. It would help sooo much.

Re:tease value

[DdJ]

Of course some say print is dead. But if print is dead then so too is the novel. No one wants to read 300 plus pages on a screen. And more importantly, no one wants to re-read a novel on screen. Very little interaction with the object there. No sense of "consumption."

I can only say that I hope you're right as far as most of the population is concerned, because I know you're wrong as far as I'm concerned. I've gotten to the point where I actually prefer to read novels on my handheld. A recent novel I bought came with a CD-ROM containing the same novel in electronic form. I loaded it on to my palm and then proceeded to totally ignore the actual book.

I've read several full-length novels this way now, and speaking only for myself, I absolutely prefer it, by a fairly wide margin. I have an entire library in my pocket all the time, the book mark never falls out, and I can read in the dark. Hurah for the Baen free library!

ebooks is all I read anymore

[jridley]

I read books only on my Palm anymore. I certainly would prefer to read on paper instead of my IIIxe's greenish screen (I'm upgrading soon), but I never carry books around with me, and if I do, just in my bag so I only have them at my desk.

With 3 or 4 books in my Palm, I've got a book to read everywhere. I've read 10 times more books since using the Palm than when on paper.

Also we're way over capacity on paper books in our house; we just don't have room for what we have. We have about 300 linear feet of shelf space, much of it double-shelved, and another couple hundred pounds of books in boxes. I'm just not going to add to that by buying more paper.

Thank God for Baen books. I'd decided not to buy from Peanut Press anymore because I dislike having to remember credit card numbers from 5 years ago to unlock books, and I dislike paying as much for eBooks as for paper; I should at least get a few bucks off.

Baen publishes much of their catalog electronically, in open formats, at reasonable prices.

artists and compensation and chump change

[rjnagle]

This is an exceptionally fine piece, and I greatly enjoyed reading it.

Some impressions:

Although I'm happy that Mr. Doctorow has made a profit off his creative commons releases, I have a feeling that his case is an exception rather than the rule, and that once the the novelty value of creative commons content released by commercial publishers die down fewer people will be inclined to try first, buy later. (That is not worse than the status quo however). As pda's and ereaders become more user friendly, the temptation not to buy the hard copy will become irresistable for creative commons works.

I advocate a tip-based model of artistic compensation http://www.geocities.com/bigbadlinux/. Perhaps voluntary "pay-what-you-want" scenario is unrealistic, but compensation becomes viable when the pricepoint is low enough to seem insignificant.

A few years ago, memberships to porn sites cost 30-50$ a month; nowadays even most of them offer 1 day or 1 week memberships for gigabytes of movies. One could use emule to get these things, but when the price point starts resembling chump change, that's when people start voluntarily paying for online content.

If you look at this audio book site, for example http://www.audiobooksforfree.com/screen_main.asp?g g=1&mg=2
downloading mp3 audios for entire novels cost only about $5. That's close to the level of chump change.

Right now POD books easily sell for $10-12, but 100% virtual content could probably go for $2-3. Content needs to be priced in a way that appears to be chump change for the buyer/reader but gains enough readership for chump change to add up to something substantial. Fortunately, the existence of weblogs like www.maudnewton.com and viral marketing make it easier to get your content out there.

The future is weblogs people.